Quotes About Economics

Raising tax rates does not raise revenues. In fact, just the opposite happens. The rich just find a way to legally shelter their money and avoid the higher taxes. And who could blame them. But every time we've lowered tax rates, revenues rose. Harding. Coolidge. Hoover. Kennedy. Reagan. Bush. They all got that.

If you look at mainstream economics there are three things you will not find in a mainstream economic model - Banks, Debt, and Money. How anybody can think they can analyze capital while leaving out Banks, Debt, and Money is a bit to me like an ornithologist trying to work out how a bird flies whilst ignoring that the bird has wings...

Engineers do engineering, i.e. they build bridges. So engineering needs engineers. The economy does NOT need economists. Economists do not make economy, but they try it and that is why we have so much problems with some financial models.

I am often asked what I would keep of Neoclassical economics in a new paradigm. My answer is that I would keep as much of Neoclassical economics as modern astronomy kept of Ptolemaic astronomy – which is to say, nothing at all.

The position I now favor is that economics is a pre-science, rather like astronomy before Copernicus, Brahe and Galileo. I still hold out hope of better behavior in the future, but given the travesties of logic and anti-empiricism that have been committed in its name, it would be an insult to the other sciences to give economics even a tentative membership of that field.1

As Thorstein Veblen correctly surmised over a century ago, the failure of economics to become an evolutionary science is the product of the optimizing framework of the underlying paradigm, which is inherently antithetical to the process of evolutionary change. This is the primary reason why the neoclassical mantra that the economy must be perceived as the outcome of the decisions of utility-maximizing individuals must be squarely rejected.

We should look closely on what is happening at the moment, guys with little moustaches can pop up everywhere now given this instable economic situation. A look into history shows us what that could mean.

The fallacy that dynamic processes must be modeled as if the system is in continuous equilibrium is probably the most important reason for the intellectual failure of neoclassical economics. Mathematics, science and engineering developed tools long ago to model outside of equilibrium processes. This dynamic approach to thinking about the economy should become second nature to economists.

As we suggested near the beginning of this book, if morality represents an ideal world, then economics represents the actual world.

Since the science of economics is primarily a set of tools, as opposed to a subject matter, then no subject, however offbeat, need be beyond its reach.

There are three basic flavours of incentive: economic, social and moral.

With any problem, it's important to figure out which incentives will actually work, not just what your moral compass tells you should work.

And while it sounds bad to hear that Americans underpay their taxes by nearly one-fifth, the tax economist Joel Slemrod estimates that the U.S. is easily within the upper tier of worldwide compliance rates.

la economía como ciencia consiste fundamentalmente en un conjunto de herramientas, más que una cuestión de contenido, ningún tema se halla fuera de su alcance.

There are three basic flavors of incentive: economic, social, and moral.

podría sugerir que la moral representa el modo en que a las personas les gustaría que funcionase el mundo, mientras que la economía representa cómo funciona éste en realidad.

What most of these doomsday scenarios have gotten wrong is the fundamental idea of economics: people respond to incentives. If the price of a good goes up, people demand less of it, the companies that make it figure out how to make more of it, and everyone tries to figure out how to produce substitutes for it. Add to that the march of technological innovation (like the green revolution, birth control, etc.). The end result: markets figure out how to deal with problems of supply and demand.

Los economistas ya han tenido bastantes dificultades para explicar el pasado, así que no hablemos de predecir el futuro.

la moral representa el modo en que a las personas les gustaría que funcionase el mundo, mientras que la economía representa cómo funciona éste en realidad.

Los incentivos constituyen la piedra angular de la vida moderna.

that number is 58 percent

El enfoque económico no pretende describir el mundo como cualquiera de nosotros quisiera que fuera, o teme que sea, o reza por que llegue a ser, sino más bien explicar lo que hay en la realidad. La mayoría de nosotros querría arreglar o cambiar el mundo de alguna manera. Pero para cambiar el mundo, primero hay que comprenderlo.

Steven D. Levitt

Here's a guess: anybody who bothers to change his name in the name of economic success is—like the high-school freshmen in Chicago who entered the school-choice lottery—at least highly motivated, and motivation is probably a stronger indicator of success than, well, a name.